Transcending Embodiment: Communication in the Posthuman Condition

Abstract

In Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, John Durham Peters argues that soul merger between humans is impossible because communication could never transcend the existential barrier between self and other. I contest Peters’ argument by constructing my own history starting from where Peters’ history leaves off. I show how disembodied communication is imagined in William Gibson's classic science fiction novel, Neuromancer, how cyberfeminist artists import embodiment into virtual realities, and how Ray Kurzweil's “the Singularity,” the notion that in our not-too-distant future humans will evolve into machines, makes posthuman communication a coming reality.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.